Joyce leaving Knight after steering firm from meltdown to merger

Thomas Joyce, who built Knight Capital Group Inc. into one of the biggest U.S. market making firms only to see it driven to the brink of bankruptcy and then into a suitor’s arms, is leaving the company.

KCG Holdings Inc., the company created when Getco LLC completed the acquisition of Knight this week, announced the resignation in an e-mailed statement. Joyce had been executive chairman. KCG named Stephen Schuler, a Getco founder, as non- executive chairman, according to the statement.

While Joyce steered Knight through a decade of growth in which revenue more than doubled, he will also be remembered for being chief executive officer when a computer malfunction caused the company to lose more than $450 million on a single day in August through erroneous trades. The Harvard College graduate was able to keep the firm out of insolvency by arranging a cash bailout a week later and in December sold Knight to Getco LLC in a deal valued at about $1.4 billion.

“He did a fabulous job,” said Buzzy Geduld, chief executive officer of Cougar Trading in New York, who worked with Joyce when they were both at Merrill Lynch. “He was forced to do a deal in 48 hours or so and he navigated that in a wonderful way and a professional way. The doors opened and the company stayed in business.”

Knight’s computers flooded markets with unintended trades on Aug. 1, 2012, sending dozens of stocks into spasms. The fault caused shares to swing as much as 151% and left the firm with $450 million trading loss that would have sent it into bankruptcy hadn’t a group of Wall Street firms bought a commensurate amount of convertible securities a week later.

Getco put its chief executive officer, Daniel Coleman, in charge of the combined firm. A government filing in December showed Joyce was poised to collect a $7.5 million retention payment that would come due when Getco, the Chicago-based high- frequency trading firm, completed the deal. An employment contract was scheduled to end when the acquisition was finalized or the last day of 2014, whichever is sooner, the filing said.

The takeover by Getco ended the 17-year independence of Jersey City, New Jersey-based Knight, a company propelled by the explosion in electronic trading in American stock markets. While joining with Getco preserved Knight’s listing and expanded its reach, both companies are contending with U.S. stock trading that has contracted for three straight years.